Podcast: Abecedarian Study Tracks Impact from Infancy to Age 30

Among the growing pile of influential studies on early education, a few have become landmarks. They have tracked children over not just one year or two years, but into their mid 20s, and even at age 40, giving us important information on how participants have fared now that they are adults. The Abecedarian Project – an early childhood program for children from infancy through age 5 — is one of these famous studies. Last month, in an article in the journal Developmental Psychology, researchers released results of a study on later outcomes for the children in the Abecedarian project, giving us fresh information on their well-being at age 30.

In our podcast today, we talk with Craig Ramey, an internationally renowned scholar of early childhood research who created the Abecedarian Project in the 1970s. Ramey is now a professor and distinguished research scholar at Virginia Tech’s Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute. He is among the co-authors of the Developmental Pyschology article; the article’s lead writer is Frances Campbell, a senior scientist at the FPG Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.